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“Weekend, dolce weekend”

One of the more interesting things about being in Italy has been learning the language better, and seeing just how much American culture/English language influences the way people speak, dress and generally communicate here — even though every few people actually speak English. But people of all ages wear shirts with English slogans (that often don’t make sense), and whenever I’ve gone to the more crowded beach where there are lots of young people, I’ve heard the same music I’d hear if I were at home listening to any top-40 station — Usher, Missy Elliot, Justin Timberlake, etc. But the difference is, nobody actually knows what they’re saying. Or, some people do, but Cagliari isn’t like Florence or Rome where most people speak at least a little English. Here, you have to ask for what you want in Italian, or you won’t get it.

So when I saw this sign in a department store window, I just had to laugh:

Weekend

Weekend, sweet weekend. In Italian. Sort of.


5 thoughts on “Weekend, dolce weekend”

  1. funny! I remember being in Bologna in the winter, and walking near an outdoor skating rink where children were skating. They were blaring American music and Britney Spears’ “I’m a slave…for you” came on and I thought, this is so odd…these people have NO IDEA what this song is saying.

    Also I went to see an American rap group while I was there, and they kept talking to the crowd and telling them to put their hands in the air,and only like three people did it. They were a pretty political group and it was strange to be one of the only people there who understood anything they were saying, since I’d spent the week feeling like I didn’t understand anyone…

  2. My friend said the same thing about Spain and t-shirts. People in their teens were walking around with highly suggestive slogans emblazoned across their chests, none of which made much sense past the innuendo.

    Makes me think twice about my singular kanji t-shirt.

  3. This reminds me of an op-ed I saw in the NYT once (I think); the author was a German writer, and he wrote the column in German, but with so many words from English that Germans now use, that an English speaker could have understood a good portion of it. Which was precisely the point.

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  5. I guess I don’t see the funny here. Weekend is a word in italian. It means the same thing as our word weekend, and it isn’t a reecent cultural import. There was no italian word for the span of days around the sabbath where most people didn’t have to work, so they borrowed the english word for it about 50 years ago. I remember learning Italian 10 years ago, and this was one of the fun things we learned. This was also from a prof who used to say that English was the bastard child of Italian and German…

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